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Already from early age it was clear that Jürgen had technique in his blood. He learned electronics and started soldering printed circuit boards at young age. His parents had to replace the fuses regularly after yet another electronics experiment that went awkward. On his fifteenth birthday he could convince his parents to buy one of the first computers. Jürgen threw himself on the early programming languages, at the time still mixed with a lot of assembler code.

Jürgen later graduated as a Master of Engineering in electronics. After a brief period as microchip designer at the former Bell Telephone company in Antwerp he decided to continue his studies with an additional Master of Applied Sciences and Engineering at the university of Brussels. The studies were followed by a PhD in Applied Sciences. In his PhD Jürgen merged apparently totally different system identification domains (linear system identification, Fuzzy Logic, neural networks) in a common framework.

Jürgen started teaching at the Geel Engineering Polytechnical Institute as an electronics and computer sciences professor. In parallel he worked as a freelancer for software and project management in many different companies. This evolved in into management consultancy and senior project management. A choice had to be made and Jürgen gave up his academic career in favor of the Business track.

He further specialized and continued studying service management, Prince2, PMI project management and Enterprise Architecture. Jürgen soon discovered that seemingly competing project management methodologies, e.g. Waterfall and Agile, have governance and Business principles in common. Each methodology has use cases where they perform best. Similar to what he practiced in his PhD Jürgen brought different project management methodologies together in a single framework: Chagwa V1.

In 2009 Jürgen joined the Bayard Partnership, a successful outsourcing supply business. By sticking to its founding principle that ‘excellence can only be achieved by working with people that are 100% connected to what they do, both intellectually and emotionally’, The Partnership has enjoyed steady growth since its inception back in 2004.

In The Castle Jürgen describes in a light-hearted way how project management and project documentation comes to the rescue for a king. The book is based on Jurgen’s experience as a technical writer, and the dry theory is packed as a comical story of knights, kings and princesses and of course a wize wizard. In view of the book Jürgen bundled his project management documentation templates that he created and used in many companies in years of project management. The templates are made available for free under the Chagwa project methodology.